“Early access on Vessel will be offered for only $2.99 a month, a low price made possible by incorporating a modest amount of advertising. For those not as interested in early access, we also have a free, ad-supported version of the service, where videos become available after their early access period.”

Vessel will offer paying subscribers a three-day early access window, but is also promising video creators that they will be able to publish their clips elsewhere (read: on YouTube) after those three days are over. Which makes you wonder: Will people really pay to get those clips three days early?

Apparently, creators have been wondering the same thing. Vessel did reveal Wednesday that it is working with YouTube stars like Shane Dawson and Rhett & Link, and that the platform will also feature content from Machinima, Tastemade and others, but word has been that the company has had a hard time signing up creators for its model. That’s despite the promise to give them a lot more money. Again, from the blog post:

“Vessel’s business model (subscription + advertising) will deliver unusually attractive economics for creators, allowing them to pursue their dreams and share ever more ambitious work with their fans. During the early access period on Vessel, we estimate that creators will earn approximately $50 for every thousand views (up to 20x the levels earned from free, ad-supported distribution). After Vessel’s early access period, creators will continue to earn money through distribution of their videos on the free, ad-supported web – on Vessel and anywhere else they choose.”

Because of the sign-up challenge, Vessel had to postpone its launch. The company tried to get Vessel ready by the end of the year, and in fact, Vessel’s website promised that it was “coming in 2014.” Now, it is only opening up a sign-up phase for creators, and promises consumers to be ready by early 2015.

Vessel’s homepage, until earlier this week

]]>Would you pay to get your YouTube videos three days early?https://gigaom.com/2014/11/17/would-you-pay-to-get-your-youtube-videos-three-days-early/
https://gigaom.com/2014/11/17/would-you-pay-to-get-your-youtube-videos-three-days-early/#commentsMon, 17 Nov 2014 22:45:13 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=889581Jason Kilar wants YouTube fans to pay up in order to be first in line.

The former Hulu CEO is looking to get videos of YouTube stars with a three-day window for his new startup Vessel, which is set to launch in the next few weeks, according to an AdAge report. Kilar has been trying to strike deals with 100 to 200 of YouTube’s top creators, according to that report, offering them cash in return for a windowed release strategy that would have them release their videos on Vessel three days before they’re allowed to also upload them on YouTube.

Vessel plans to then ask consumers to pay for these videos through a monthly subscription, but also run ads against the content — which is pretty much the same model that Kilar established at Hulu for longer-form TV content. And that’s not where the similarities end, according to AdAge: Vessel is also offering brands an ad selector that gives consumers a way to choose the most relevant ads for them, something that Hulu has been doing for some time as well.

Kilar has been working on Vessel for over a year, but early reports indicated that Kilar initially aimed to do a premium subscription service for magazine content. Kilar unveiled the name of the company, which previously operated under the stealthy Fremont Project moniker, as well as its direction and some major funding in June.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2014/11/17/would-you-pay-to-get-your-youtube-videos-three-days-early/feed/4Surprise: Ex-Hulu boss Jason Kilar’s new startup Vessel is also doing videohttps://gigaom.com/2014/06/24/surprise-ex-hulu-boss-jason-kilars-new-startup-vessel-is-also-doing-video/
https://gigaom.com/2014/06/24/surprise-ex-hulu-boss-jason-kilars-new-startup-vessel-is-also-doing-video/#commentsTue, 24 Jun 2014 21:38:49 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=852898Hulu’s founding CEO Jason Kilar revealed a few more details about his new mystery startup Tuesday: The company, which previously was code-named The Fremont Project, is actually called Vessel. It’s doing something in the online video space, and its backers include Benchmark, Greylock Partners and Jeff Bezos.

Kilar published a brief blog post about Vessel on the company’s site Tuesday, which promptly became unavailable soon after. The post read, in part:

“We’ve been busy building a service whose mission is to delight consumers and content creators alike. Though we still have more work to do at Vessel, we want to share this brief update and reach out to the creator community. If you are a content creator, particularly a video content creator, we should talk! We have assembled a unique and talented team, with strong experience building and innovating at places like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. As a team, we are unusually passionate about the intersection of media and technology; we see an opportunity to improve media, particularly next generation video.”

Vessel’s team includes of a number of ex-Hulu folks, including Hulu’s former CTO Richard Tom, Hulu’s former Product VP Lonn Lee, the company’s former Head of Recruiting Megan Healey and its former SVP of Advertising Jean-Paul Colaco. So it would make a lot of sense for Vessel to do something in the video space as well, right?

In theory, yes. However, there have been a number of reports that Kilar was actually trying to build something else — a subscription platform for premium publishing content — kind of like a Hulu Plus for magazine articles, if you will. Word on the street is now that the company had to change course because publishers weren’t to keen on handing Kilar their crown jewels.

So what will Vessel do? Kilar isn’t talking yet, but here’s one clue: I’ve heard that while still at Hulu, Kilar started to think about how to take the Buzzfeed model of pop-culture-infused and social-sharing-optimized content and adopt it for video and the living room. It’s unclear how exactly this would look like, as Buzzfeed is obviously already producing its own videos, and there is of course a chance that Vessel is about something else entirely.

According to Kilar’s post, we’re going to know more before the end of the year.

This post was updated at 3:20pm to correct the spelling of Lonn Lee’s name.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2014/06/24/surprise-ex-hulu-boss-jason-kilars-new-startup-vessel-is-also-doing-video/feed/2Ex-Hulu CEO Jason Kilar taps a few more former colleagues for his Fremont Projecthttps://gigaom.com/2014/02/13/ex-hulu-ceo-jason-kilar-taps-a-few-more-former-colleagues-for-his-fremont-project/
Thu, 13 Feb 2014 22:14:58 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=816967The Freemont Project, the digital magazine startup launched by former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, continues with its tradition of hiring former colleagues away from the video service.

Fremont’s new director of finance Brent Conkling had the same job at Hulu; Anthony Di Muccio, who joined Fremont as an ad sales manager this month, did the same at Hulu before leaving for a very brief stint at Condé Nast; and Fremont’s new director of advertising Steven DeMain was also a long-time Hulu employee, working in the same capacity for the video service before Kilar hired him away.

Kilar reportedly wants to offer digital magazine content through an exclusive, windowed subscription service, and ad revenue seems to be a key part of that model — just the way it was at Hulu. However, not everyone is sure that the Hulu model will work for ads. Count our own Mathew Ingram among the skeptics. Earlier this month, he wrote:

“Jason Kilar is obviously a smart guy, and Hulu is a fairly sizeable success story, even if you include the disputes among the partners about the future of the entity that ultimately led to Kilar’s departure. But I don’t think the vision of a similar service for magazines and/or newspapers is going to work.”

]]>Why Jason Kilar’s rumored “Hulu for magazines” startup probably isn’t going to workhttps://gigaom.com/2014/02/04/why-jason-kilars-rumored-hulu-for-magazines-startup-probably-isnt-going-to-work/
https://gigaom.com/2014/02/04/why-jason-kilars-rumored-hulu-for-magazines-startup-probably-isnt-going-to-work/#commentsTue, 04 Feb 2014 22:51:21 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=813932According to a recent report at Re/code, former Hulu founder and CEO Jason Kilar — who left the streaming online-video company a year ago — has been pitching publishers on a service he is trying to build that would offer magazine and even newspaper content via a Hulu-style model. The venture, currently known as The Fremont Project, would come complete with a TV-style “windowing” approach, in which some content would be exclusive to users of the service for a period of time before being released through the usual channels.

The idea of a Hulu or Netflix for magazines and newspaper content is a pretty popular one — so popular that Next Issue Media, which offers bundled access to a stable of mainstream magazines, has been called both of those things. But the idea actually pre-dates either of those companies: before they came along, the same concept was described as “iTunes for news” or “iTunes for magazines,” and plenty of people have tried and failed to build one.

Jason Kilar is obviously a smart guy, and Hulu is a fairly sizeable success story, even if you include the disputes among the partners about the future of the entity that ultimately led to Kilar’s departure. But I don’t think the vision of a similar service for magazines and/or newspapers is going to work (in the interests of full disclosure, I didn’t think Hulu or Netflix would work either).

Different content, different market

Here are a few reasons why I don’t think Hulu for magazines is going to work, and why I think Next Issue Media (which is backed by major publishers like Hearst and Conde Nast) is likely not going to be a barn-burner of an idea either — some of which I covered in a post about the launch of Next Issue’s iPad app in 2012:

The type of content: Hulu and Netflix work well for specific types of content, namely movies and episodes of TV shows, in the same way that iTunes works fairly well for individual songs. These are the kinds of content that people a) are willing to wait for — in some cases at least, b) are willing to pay for and c) are willing to watch or listen to multiple times. No one reads a magazine story over and over or returns to newspaper stories that they remember reading as a child. It’s just not that kind of content experience, and never will be.

The number of players: One of the reasons that iTunes and Hulu both worked at a certain scale is that Apple and Hulu were able to strike sweeping content deals with the major players in their respective markets — six major record labels and less than a dozen major studios and TV networks. I’m sceptical that Kilar’s new project can build a big enough stable of content producers to make it worthwhile economically, especially with Next Issue already out there.

The market itself: Trailers for movies and clips from TV shows are often leaked online, in many cases by the studios and networks themselves in order to boost publicity for the finished product — but nothing in those markets even begins to approach the scale with which news leaks out about interviews or news stories in magazines and newspapers. Virtually anything worth knowing appears long before the actual printed or digital publication, and that problem (if it is one) is getting worse rather than better.

A newsstand isn’t the right model

As I tried to argue in my post about Next Issue Media and in subsequent discussions of that model, I also don’t think “newsstand”-style magazine or newspaper portals or apps will work for enough users to make them viable, because I don’t think they fit the way that people find or consume content now. So much of it is socially-driven that Facebook and Twitter and blogs are the main engine for content discovery for growing numbers of people, not a single app from a specific company. And windowing the way Re/code describes it is highly problematic:

“The difference in Kilar’s pitch, say people who have heard it, is that he wants to create a new “window” for publishers’ stuff. The idea is that after publishers distribute a print and/or digital version of their content for their subscribers, Kilar’s company would get exclusive digital rights for a period. Eventually publishers could distribute their stuff on the open Web if they wanted.”

I’ve heard from a number of friends who like Next Issue because they can get access to multiple titles, but I’ve heard from just as many or more who said they signed up but never go there. Part of the problem, I think, is that Next Issue sees people consuming content at the magazine title level, when most people just want to be exposed to the one or two interesting articles that their friends think they should read or that a variety of algorithms suggest to them, a la Flipboard.

If Kilar was to unbundle the main title dynamic and provide that kind of discovery on an individual article level, it might work somewhat better, but I’d be willing to bet that publishers wouldn’t like that idea at all. And unlike Apple and iTunes, I don’t think Kilar has enough weight to force a deal like that down their throats the way Steve Jobs did with the record companies.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2014/02/04/why-jason-kilars-rumored-hulu-for-magazines-startup-probably-isnt-going-to-work/feed/5Jason Kilar’s secretive Fremont Project nabs more Hulu talenthttps://gigaom.com/2013/11/08/jason-kilars-secretive-fremont-project-nabs-more-hulu-talent/
Fri, 08 Nov 2013 20:49:59 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=714305It’s starting to become a pattern: Ex-Hulu CEO Jason Kilar has recruited some more of his former co-workers to join him at his new startup, which is stealthily called the Fremont Project. Hulu’s Product VP Loon Lee jumped ship this week, according to AdAge, and a quick Linkedin search reveals that Hulu’s Head of Recruiting Megan Healey switched over to the Fremont Project this month as well.

It’s still unclear what exactly the Fremont Project is working on, but AdAge speculated that it may have something to do with mobile and video. The company has only said that it is a “consumer-focused venture,” and Colaco’s hire suggests that whatever it is working on will be ad-supported.

Speaking of hires: Kilar’s company recently put up one of those cute pre-interview puzzles to attract new talent. To the uninitiated, it looks like just a collection of random pages that prompt you to click through, but I suspect that the URLs of these pages contain some kind of clues. Either that, or there’s some secret message that’s only being revealed when you access from within Hulu’s intranet…

]]>Hulu’s former ad chief joins Jason Kilar’s new stealth startuphttps://gigaom.com/2013/10/21/hulus-former-ad-chief-joins-jason-kilars-new-stealth-startup/
Mon, 21 Oct 2013 16:28:55 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=706890Same boss, new job: Hulu’s former SVP of advertising Jean-Paul “JP” Colaco just took a position at the Fremont Project, the new stealth startup headed up by Hulu’s founding CEO Jason Kilar and ex-Hulu CTO Richard Tom. Colaco’s departure from Hulu was announced earlier this month, but at the time, interim Hulu CEO Andy Forssell only said that he was going to “pursue one of a few new startup opportunities he has in front of him.”

Colaco joined Hulu early on, when the company still didn’t have a name (and us journalists jumped on the opportunity to call them ClownCo). He was instrumental to the company’s ad business, with Forssell writing earlier this month on Hulu’s blog:

“He drove much of the innovation in advertising that Hulu has become known for — including Ad Swap, Ad Selector, and 100% Completion Rate. Most importantly, JP has hired and mentored one of the most talented ad sales teams in the business. ”

Colaco is joining the Fremont Project as SVP of advertising and business development, so he will have the opportunity to repeat that success story at Kilar’s startup. We don’t quite know yet what Colaco will be selling ads against, though. The Fremont Project unveiled its name, and little else, earlier this month, and its website only states that it wants to “build something great,” whatever that means. Oh, and it is looking to hire.

]]>Fox exec Mike Hopkins officially named Hulu CEOhttps://gigaom.com/2013/10/17/foxs-mike-hopkins-named-hulu-ceo-andy-forstall-departs/
Thu, 17 Oct 2013 19:24:31 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=705841Mike Hopkins, the Fox executive considered the lead candidate for the position of Hulu CEO, was officially appointed to it Thursday. Acting CEO Andy Forssell will leave the company.

Hopkins is the president of distribution for Fox Networks Group and has been on Hulu’s board since 2011. Fox parent company News Corp (s NWS) owns about a third of Hulu; Disney (s DIS) owns another third; and Comcast owns the rest but can’t directly influence the company thanks to conditions for its merger with NBC Universal (s GE).

“After an extensive search, Mike was simply the best candidate for the job,” Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of Disney/ABC TV, said in a statement. “He has a strong understanding of programming, digital distribution and consumer behavior, and a great vision for Hulu’s next chapter.”

Hulu’s CEO search has been going on since the beginning of the year, when Jason Kilar left the company. But even before that, Disney and News Corp had battled each other over the future of the streaming TV site, which offers both free and premium versions. As my colleague Janko Roettgers reported last year, News Corp wants to force consumers to authenticate their pay TV subscriptions before using the free version of the site; Fox shows are only available to non-Hulu Plus users after an eight-day delay. Disney, meanwhile, apparently doesn’t think Hulu users to have to prove they’re paying cable customers.

In his new role, Hopkins will be grappling with those issues and helping to determine the future of Hulu — whether it’s essentially a TV Everywhere service or whether it can exist as a free alternative to pay TV.

According to the most recently released statistics, Hulu had more than four million Hulu Plus subscribers (paying $7.99 per month) in the first quarter of 2013 — double the number of paying subscribers from the same time in 2012. The free service, meanwhile, gets about 30 million monthly unique visitors. Hulu also said it streamed more than 1 billion videos in both the first and second quarters of this year.

In a letter to Hulu employees also posted on Hulu’s blog, Hopkins wrote:

“The fact is, through all the recent uncertainty not only have you kept this business together, but you’ve continued to deliver on every key performance metric. In fact, you are delivering one of the strongest years Hulu has ever seen: We expect revenues to be close to a billion dollars this year, and Hulu Plus subscribers continue to climb.”

]]>Hulu Agonisteshttps://gigaom.com/2013/06/07/hulu-agonistes/
Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:19:40 +0000http://pro.gigaom.com/?post_type=go_shortpost&p=179279Hulu has been for sale — on and off — for the better part of three years. But with the latest round of bids now in, it’s not clear that the company is any closer to being sold than it was in October 2011 when its owners terminated the sale process the last time around without a deal.

The problem, as Sweeney noted, is that Hulu was always more of an idea than a company, notwithstanding the valiant efforts of former CEO Jason Kilar and his team to build a business around it. And may be an idea whose time has come — and now gone.

News Corp. and NBC Universal launched Hulu in 2008 (Disney joined later) largely out of frustration with how much of their content was showing up illegally on YouTube. The networks wanted some place to put their content online where it could compete legally with YouTube and other sites (not for nothing was it dubbed “ScrewTube” and “MeTooTube” by wags before being officially christened “Hulu”).

Almost from the start, however, the owners were ambivalent both about Hulu itself and their own involvement in it, and became more so over time as the online video business has expanded. The networks’ strategic interest, as with any rights owner, is to license their content as non-exclusively as possible to as many different buyers as possible for as much money as possible. Their ownership interest in Hulu, however, created an incentive for them to aggregate all their content under one roof. Ideally, then, they would love to disaggregate those rights as part of any divestment of Hulu.

The problem is that without those aggregated rights Hulu really isn’t worth very much.

The company has done an admirable job of establishing its brand within the online video space. But most of the equity in that brand is tied to rights it controls. It generated $695 million in revenue last year, and may get close to $1 billion this year, but it also has $350 million in debt. It has some nifty ad technology and a nice UI, but neither of those things are irreplaceable and no one is likely to pay a premium for them. It has 4 million subscribers paying $7.99 a month for its premium tier, but half of that revenue flows back to the rights owners, which would make those subs largely unprofitable to a buyer under the current terms.

About the only immediately leveragable asset Hulu has apart from content rights is its embedded presence on a large number of connected devices, giving it a solid addressable base on which to build a distribution business. That addressable base of subscribers is no doubt part of what makes Hulu attractive to DirecTV, Time Warner Cable and AT&T. But even there, the ability to grow that base of devices is contingent on the content that a Hulu app makes accessible.

Another problem for the sellers is that the downside of selling to the wrong buyer is greater than the downside to doing nothing. Selling Hulu to a pay-TV service provider with its current rights package in place could greatly complicate the networks’ business relationships with competing service providers.

I don’t think Sweeney was speaking idly last week. The latest solicitation of bids may well turn out to have been merely exploratory: a chance to see if someone would offer enough money for Hulu to let the owners bury their ambivalence over the whole thing under a pile of cash.

Hulu has succeeded at its main mission. It proved that a legal streaming business can be built that competes with free. Unless the bids come up substantially from where they are now, Hulu’s owners may just decide to hang a Mission Accomplished banner over its offices and call it a day.

]]>Hulu’s content chief Andy Forssell officially takes over as acting CEOhttps://gigaom.com/2013/03/14/hulu-ceo-andy-forssell/
https://gigaom.com/2013/03/14/hulu-ceo-andy-forssell/#commentsThu, 14 Mar 2013 22:44:39 +0000http://paidcontent.org/?p=225979Hulu has officially announced that its SVP of content Andy Forssell will become its acting CEO when founding CEO Jason Kilar leaves the company at the end of the month. Kilar made the announcement himself Thursday afternoon on Hulu’s blog, writing:

“You know Andy well; he’s been a critical senior executive and has been here from the start of this great adventure. Andy exemplifies the Hulu culture and has been central to Hulu’s journey, helping to grow this company from 2 content partners and no revenue to over 450 content partners and approximately $700 million revenue in 2012.”

It’s been an open secret that Forssell was on the shortlist to become Hulu CEO for some time. I first heard a rumor about this in early January, and Adweek wrote that he was a likely candidate later that month. However, there were also a number of other names floating around, including at least one executive from Hulu co-owner Disney.

Speaking of co-owners: The fact that Forssell only got the job as acting CEO has a lot to do with Disney (s DIS) and News Corp. (s NWS) disagreeing over Hulu’s future. News Corp. wants to steer Hulu towards a paid subscription future, whereas Disney prefers the free, ad-based part of Hulu’s business. Finding a permanent CEO for a company whose future is in flux is apparently not that easy, which Kilar indirectly acknowledged in his blog post:

Disney and News Corporation are currently finalizing their forward-looking plans with Hulu, and the senior team has been working closely with them in that process. Once the plans are finalized, a permanent decision will be made regarding the CEO position.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that both Disney and News Corp. are considering buying the other partner out to take over majority control of Hulu. Comcast, the third studio major owner, is barred from making any decisions on Hulu’s future due to the NBC-Comcast merger conditions.